David Sedaris: The humorist with a heart

David Sedaris’s waspish observations make you want to tell all your friends
about him.

For someone who sells books by the truckload (almost eight million in 25 languages) and who can instantly fill theatres with audiences craving to hear him read from his work, comic essayist David Sedaris might cut a more charismatic figure.

Instead, he’s short and unremarkable - a man you would look straight through in a bus queue. His voice is a little high, and faintly petulant in tone. He has a strange, gap-toothed smile, and his body language is unassertive.

But Sedaris is a bona fide, if contradictory, phenomenon. He has achieved huge popularity while maintaining a low profile. Apart from his readings, he is rarely seen in public, and refreshingly has no apparent wish to establish himself as a personality.

So why is there such a buzz about him? My hunch is that word of mouth plays a huge part. Sedaris is a delightful writer, who casts himself self-deprecatingly in his waspishly funny essays, yet who gleefully nails the outlandish behaviour of other people. And once you’re hooked, your impulse is to tell everyone else about him.

I first encountered Sedaris through the pieces he regularly contributes to the New Yorker, renowned as a home for elegant writing. Sedaris is eminently in that league; he has a dry, precise style, each word chosen with care.

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Still, nothing beats hearing Sedaris read Sedaris; the audio book is a perfect medium for his virtuosity. A few years back I took a holiday which involved a road trip through the back roads of New England, with nine hours of Sedaris as in-car entertainment. I had to stop the car twice; literally weeping with laughter seemed incompatible with safe driving.

And yes, I told everyone I knew about him, and bought Sedaris audio books as gifts. This is not uncommon; and at the drop of a hat, his fans will also tell you their favourite stories and one-liners.

Two of mine fly in the face of political correctness and flirt with bad taste. In one New Yorker story, Sedaris and his long-time boyfriend Hugh were both living in Paris, and looking for the ideal apartment. They took a trip to Amsterdam and visited the Anne Frank House, where Sedaris found himself thinking what an adorable place it would be to live, and entertaining notions of how he might re-model the kitchen.

Then there was his comment about giving up smoking, reluctantly, after 30 years. He only did so because he likes staying in decent hotels on his book tours; and increasingly, decent hotels do not accommodate smokers. “But,” Sedaris added gleefully, “I recruited a teenager to take my place.”

He is 53 and grew up in the suburbs of Raleigh, North Carolina - one of six children in a Greek-American family. He has frequently written of them as a boisterous bunch: his father a well-meaning philistine who did not remotely understand his son and his slovenly mother, a cigarette omnipresent between her lips.

Sedaris clearly did not fit in, but writes about his discomfort and outsider status with wry resignation. Even the moment he came out as gay was embarrassing and anti-climactic. While he was hitch-hiking, a married couple picked him up in a Cadillac, and the husband urged him to have sex in the car with his blowsy wife, who was wearing only a negligee. Revealing that he was gay seemed his least offensive excuse.

He started keeping a diary when he was 20, and kept it current, despite his heavy use of alcohol and drugs. After school, he was effectively a drop-out and he did odd jobs - house cleaning, working as a ’Santaland’ elf in a department store -- and these experiences found their way into his diaries.

Sedaris takes a perverse pride in these humble occupations: for a newspaper interview last year, he was photographed on the floor of his bathroom, scrubbing it clean.

His break came when Chicago radio host Ira Glass discovered him, offering him a spot reading his diaries on his show. Sedaris graduated to America’s National Public Radio and soon amassed a devoted following.

But above all, his observational skills set him apart, whether it’s a detailed description of a neighbour from hell, a malevolent old woman named Helen who lived in his New York apartment building, or his own discomfort at being deeply annoyed at a passenger seated beside him on a plane, yet bottling up his rage.

I’d long assumed that he and Hugh were still living in Paris, the city he writes about most often in the New Yorker. But for almost seven years now, they have made London their home. Who knew? But then Sedaris stays beneath the radar wherever he is: all the better to observe the lives of others.

David Sedaris is at the Leicester Square Theatre, London WC2, Thurs-Sat